Using autorun.inf to display a web page when a CD is inserted

I was making up a CD of documentation for someone at work today. Rather than just dump a collection of PDFs on the CD, I thought I'd use a modified version of the PDF list on our intranet to provide a more easy to use front end. The PDF list is a web page containing links to the PDFs - so you can open the PDF in your browser by clicking the description of the document on the web page.

Having burnt CD, I thought it would be useful for the Support engineers to take with them when they were working offsite, so I offered to burn them copies. Andrew Waterson (one of the Support guys) came up with the bright idea of putting an autorun.inf file on the CD to automatically open the web page when the CD is inserted into the drive (provided your using Windows and autorun is turned on). He pointed me to this site:

www.ashzfall.com/products/autorun/browsercall.html

This provides a very nice executable file (typically, but not necessarily, called browsercall.exe) that you put on the CD and call from the autorun.inf file, with the name of the web page you want to open as a command line parameter value. For example, to open index.html, the autorun.inf file (a simple text file) just needs to contain:

open=browsercall.exe index.html

It works a treat!